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The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is a new branch of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) that is inspired by the collective foraging behavior of real honey bee colonies. Due to its foraging model and its solution search equation, ABC generally performs well in exploration but badly in exploitation. To address this concerning issue and obtain a good balance between exploration and exploitation, in this paper, we mainly introduce into the ABC an adaptive method for the population size (AMPS). AMPS is inspired by the natural principle that the size of a population is affected by the availability of food resources. When food resources are abundant, a population tends to expand; otherwise, a decrease in the availability of food resources leads to a shrinkage in the population size. Specifically, when the algorithm performs well in exploration, AMPS will shrink the population to enhance exploitation by periodically removing some inferior solutions that have low success rates. In contrast, AMPS will enlarge the population to improve exploration by introducing some reserved solutions. Furthermore, to make AMPS perform better, we design a new solution search equation for employed bees and onlooker bees. Moreover, we also improve the probability model of the onlooker bees. By embedding our three proposed algorithmic components into ABC, we propose a novel ABC variant, called APABC. To demonstrate the performance of APABC, we compare APABC with some state-of-the-art ABC variants and some other non-ABC methods on 22 scalable benchmark functions and 30 CEC2014 test functions. The simulation results show that APABC is better than or at least competitive with the competitors in terms of its solution quality, robustness and convergence speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decades, different evolutionary optimization methodologies have been proposed by scholars and exploited by practitioners, in a wide range of applications. Each paradigm shows distinctive features, typical advantages, and characteristic disadvantages; however, one single problem is shared by almost all of them: the “lack of speciation”. While natural selection favors variations toward greater divergence, in artificial evolution candidate solutions do homologize. Many authors argued that promoting diversity would be beneficial in evolutionary optimization processes, and that it could help avoiding premature convergence on sub-optimal solutions. The paper surveys the research in this area up to mid 2010s, it re-orders and re-interprets different methodologies into a single framework, and proposes a novel three-axis taxonomy. Its goal is to provide the reader with a unifying view of the many contributions in this important corpus, allowing comparisons and informed choices. Characteristics of the different techniques are discussed, and similarities are highlighted; practical ways to measure and promote diversity are also suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dynamic flexible job shop scheduling is of significant importance to the implementation of real-world manufacturing systems. In order to capture the dynamic and multi-objective nature of flexible job shop scheduling, and provide different trade-offs among objectives, this paper develops a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA)-based proactive–reactive method. The novelty of our method is that it is able to handle multiple objectives including efficiency and stability simultaneously, adapt to the new environment quickly by incorporating heuristic dynamic optimization strategies, and deal with two scheduling policies of machine assignment and operation sequencing together. Besides, a new mathematical model for the multi-objective dynamic flexible job shop scheduling problem (MODFJSSP) is constructed. With the aim of selecting one solution that fits into the decision maker’s preferences from the trade-off solution set found by MOEA, a dynamic decision making procedure is designed. Experimental results in a simulated dynamic flexible job shop show that our method can achieve much better performances than combinations of existing scheduling rules. Three MOEA-based rescheduling methods are compared. The modified ɛ -MOEA has the best overall performance in dynamic environments, and its computational time is much less than two others (i.e., NSGA-II and SPEA2). Utilities of introducing the stability objective, heuristic initialization strategies and the decision making approach are also validated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]